by Julia Pandl
“Do you want me to show you how to do this?”
“Um . . . not really.”
“Well, you’re gonna learn, Lady Jane.”
In addition to being chewed out for buying something as ridiculous as clothing, the lesson, as I recall, also included a stern scolding about the fact that, as I subtracted, I crossed out the numbers before carrying them. The whole episode left me embarrassed and scarred. I didn’t write a check again until I went to college, and I have ten years of unopened bank statements stuffed in shoe boxes in my closet.
There was always a weirdness surrounding money in our house, and as a kid it was confusing as hell. Work hard, and perhaps if you’re lucky a few bucks might float your way. Do nothing and the same thing might happen, or not. I imagine other parents had a more consistent approach, but I can see now that my father was not aiming for consistency. Instead, he fired messages from opposite directions, and in the process he somehow managed to eradicate any sense of entitlement on our part. My mother used to call him penny wise and pound foolish. The cliché was true enough, I suppose, but it was like referring to the Sistine Chapel ceiling as a painting, or Shakespeare a writer—the statement lacked the appropriate emotional intensity.
FOR ME THE money messages collided in earnest in 1986, over a can of Planters peanuts at the Drake Hotel in Chicago. I was sixteen. George and I loaded boxes of books and booze into the back of his pockmarked Subaru station wagon and headed south on a breezy Sunday afternoon in mid-May, with me at the wheel. The National Restaurant Association show was an event we looked forward to with excited anticipation, partly because it was a mecca of learning in my family, but mostly because George reserved rooms at the Drake and took us to five-star restaurants for dinner. Because there were so many of us, we didn’t travel much as a family, but the NRA fell into an “educational” category, so if we wanted to, we were all allowed to go. I even got to skip school. The choice was between two days of watching spittle form in the corners of my history teacher’s mouth as he droned on about the Civil War versus two days of eating and drinking my way up and down the Magnificent Mile—a no-brainer.
As we merged from the Edens Expressway onto the Kennedy, the Chicago skyline loomed ahead and made me giggle. It was so neatly rigid against the cloudless afternoon sky that it looked a little fake, like a backdrop in a movie. I had a vision of the car ripping through its canvas and splashing into Lake Michigan.
My father leaned over the stick shift and fished his wallet out of his back pocket. “Here,” he said, pulling out a hundred-dollar bill and handing it to me. “Here’s a little walkin’-around money.”
“Thanks, Dad.” I folded the bill into a tight square, stuffed it in the pocket of my jeans, and looked over at him. “Thanks. Really.”
“You’re welcome,” he said through an easy smile.
I had grown to appreciate that look on his face as much as I did the cash. His broad grin folded into a wonderfully pink and cheeky hug that wrapped itself around the corners of his eyes. It was a smile I could feel, one that reached out and patted my head. It wasn’t about the money. It was generosity equaling appreciation, inching toward something—happiness, I guessed—so quietly beautiful that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
We arrived in downtown Chicago around five. It had a certain cachet, pulling up to the same simple curb on the Walton side of the Drake that had greeted the likes of Churchill, Garland, DiMaggio, and Sinatra. The glass breezeway, the spit-shined brass buttons on the doorman’s coat, the gold-winged dragons with glowing white orbs tucked under the awning—it was all dazzling and elegant. It felt kind of regal, at least for about sixty seconds.
I slid the car into neutral, pulled up the parking brake, and looked over at George. “Well, chief?”
He smiled. “Nice driving.”
“Thanks.”
“Shall we, madam?” he said, giving a nod to the sophisticated atmosphere.
“But of course,” I replied, reaching for the handle on the door. Before I could ease it open myself, a bellhop dressed exactly like a flying monkey from The Wizard of Oz heaved it open for me. The driver’s-side door had been an issue ever since my sister Peggy had backed into a concrete light assembly in a parking lot and thrown the whole right side out of alignment. The back hatch was tricky to open too. George was famous for not wanting to make a claim to his insurance carrier, though, so more often than not these little imperfections became part of the car’s “charm.” When the hinge gave a loud pop, the door howled against its jamb, and a dozen or so heads, sitting on top of double-breasted Brooks Brothers flannel and St. John’s knits, turned. I realized that we were like the mangy third cousins that show up unannounced for Thanksgiving dinner. I stepped out of the car and gave the bellhop a shrug and a grin.
“Will you be checking in today, ma’am?” he asked, giving a slight bow.
“We will. Thank you.”
“Did you need help with your luggage?”
“Please, it’s in the back,” I said, handing him a five-dollar bill and achieving a slight sense of belonging.
With a twist of his finger, he signaled another bellhop to attend to the luggage. By the time I turned around and reached the back of the car, George was showing the second guy—Chuck, according to his name tag—how to open the hatch. He set his black wingtip shoe, its seams crusty with Ammens, on the bumper and pressed it down toward the asphalt. “Press down on the hatch . . . like so, and then press the button,” he instructed. As the car bounced up, so did the hatch. “Voilà,” he said with a little twitch. Honest to God, pulling up in Jed Clampett’s jalopy, rocking chair on top and all, would have been just as classy.
I LEANED MY back against the slick beveled-oak edge of the hotel’s reservation desk as my father dealt with the check-in.
“We have you booked in one of our corner suites, Mr. Pandl, one queen and two twins. Is that correct?” the woman asked as her fingers clicked around the keyboard.
“That’s correct. The rest of us should be here any minute.”
Whoever checked in before us had left behind a thin veil of cologne, vanilla, and cinnamon. It was subtle, like a cup of tea, yet it permeated the air as I stepped away to the center of the lobby. Everything in the hotel lobby looked like an heirloom, like something you’d find in a dusty corner of an antiques shop in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, except reupholstered and polished like new. A pair of armchairs on my left, covered in navy and gold chintz and coupled in an inviting way, sat behind a smooth cherry coffee table with magazines spread out in a neat little fan. And across the room a brown leather love seat and two wingback chairs were set in a semicircle around another table. Come hither, I thought, but don’t forget your ascot, your pipe, and your monocle. A splashy pink and white oasis in the center of the room, stuffed with daylilies, stargazers, and tigers, sprouted up between two appropriately ornate chandeliers. Doubting the flowers were real, I leaned in and took a sniff. They were. They smelled like wads of walkin’-around money.
“Jule,” Jeremiah called as he mounted the steps toward the centerpiece.
“Hey. Dad’s just check—” I stopped and looked him up and down. “Nice outfit.”
“I know,” he said, and looked down at his clothes. “I had just finished cutting the lawn when Katie picked me up.”
His hair had been cut recently, but it was so greasy that for a second I honestly wanted to pretend I didn’t know him. He had on a Who jersey and baggy gray sweatpants with a long rip across the thigh that exposed his plaid boxer shorts. The handle of his toothbrush hung out of the right pocket. His penny loafers were caked green with grass clippings and some clung to the tiny hairs around his ankles. He looked like a runaway.
“What’s in the bag?” I asked, pointing to the black Hefty bag he had tied around his fist.
“My clothes.”
“Those are your good clothes?”
“Yep.”
“Nice.”
“I know, I know. I couldn’t find a
ny luggage at Jimmy and Treasie’s.”
“Our stuff’s on that cart over there,” I said, gesturing across the lobby to where the cart was parked between a set of long red damask curtains braided with gold rope. They looked like something Scarlett O’Hara might have ripped down and worn to visit Rhett Butler in jail.
By the time George had finished checking in, Katie and three other women who worked with her in the restaurant’s catering division—Wendy, Liz, and Tammy—had arrived. They tossed their luggage on the cart and we all crammed into the tiny elevator with the bellhop. I saw him raise an eyebrow and smile when he noticed Wendy carrying two jugs of chardonnay, one in each hand, her fingers curled under the small glass loop handles. Nothing says swanky like a jug of wine.
We had too many people in the room—that was clear. They kept showing up—Katie’s friend Colleen, our brother Stevie, a few wait people from the restaurant. Every time I heard a knock and opened the door, it was like a clown car let out. When my father called down and asked that eight cots be set up for the evening, the guy at the desk finally put his foot down.
“Eight?” I heard a husky voice shout through the receiver. Then I heard it say something about fire codes, and “. . . not a Howard Johnson’s,” and “perhaps . . . but . . . no other rooms available.”
George hung up the phone and looked at me, his mouth stretched into a thin, tight smile and his eyebrows arched as if I were his accomplice. He said, “They’re sending up two.”
I remember being struck by how deliciously unaware he was. Because we had worked together, because I had seen him standing in his office at the restaurant wearing nothing but his brown support hose and his powder blue boxers, my father had let his unself-conscious side worm its way well past the point of being uncomfortable. I knew he simply didn’t care that the hotel staff was, perhaps, at that very moment, pasting WANTED posters bearing our pictures on the wall behind the check-in desks. The notion that none of this really mattered put me, oddly, at ease.
Still, I couldn’t help but ask, “Are they gonna kick us out?”
“For heaven’s sake, no,” he said, and laughed.
That night we went to Nick’s Fishmarket for dinner—fifteen of us, I think. Nick’s was, and still is, a Chicago landmark, dress-code fancy with white tablecloths; tuxedos; napkins folded like little geisha fans; and lots of different forks, spoons, and glassware. And chilled butter rosettes.
I noticed the butter because it was a big deal in our house. My mother had a thing about it. At any given time, there were two operational butters in our kitchen: a one-pound restaurant block that lived in the corner next to the toaster, and a quarter-pound store-bought stick that lived in the fridge on a Wedgwood dish with a lid. The toaster butter never left the counter. In a constant state of flux and mottled with bread crumbs, it melted and solidified, depending on the temperature inside and out. It was home to three, sometimes four, different knives, caked with grape jelly, cinnamon sugar, braunschweiger, mayonnaise, whatever. The Wedgwood butter, on the other hand, came out only at dinnertime. Something about it made the dinner hour bedlam slightly more bearable for my mother.
They were handmade, the butter rosettes at Nick’s, not the mass-produced, metal-pressed kind, and there were no cinnamon toast crumbs. The tablecloth was crisp, clean, and smooth under my palm. I felt grown up, like my first day as pancake girl, and comfortable, if not completely at home, in front of the intricate place setting. The only problem was the smell. Working the Sunday brunch, surrounded by ten- and twenty-gallon pots of hot boiled shrimp, had scarred something in my olfactory tract the same way the sausage had scarred my thigh. Even today the smell of anything hot, aquatic, and exoskeletal makes my stomach churn and my tongue sweat, like I’ve just licked the slippery tile floor of a girls’ locker room.
But dinner came with its own set of rules, of course, so I had to order some type of crustacean or I’d never hear the end of it. We were not allowed to order anything inappropriate—for example, no cheeseburgers in a Chinese restaurant, no chicken fingers and fries in an Italian place, and no pizza in a seafood restaurant. Nor were we allowed to repeat orders, so if the guy ahead of you ordered something you had your eye on, too bad. You had to pick something else, and quick.
Because he considered it an educational experience, when choosing appetizers my father liked to do quirky things, like ordering everything on the left side of the menu. Dinner was an exercise in endurance, pacing, and prudence—like running a marathon, except your pants grew tight enough to inhibit circulation. Barrels of beer and wine were followed by wagon trains of appetizers, entrées, and desserts. The thrill of another harrowing dining experience, and the agony of hideous flatulence, inevitably came on the heels of the check. George flipped open the black leather folder and said, “Who wants to guess?” We all did. Whoever came closest without going over had to pay. Guessing the bill was part of the deal. He passed around torn slips of paper and we all wrote down our answers. I can’t remember who won, but I do remember the bill being in the neighborhood of twelve hundred dollars. But George paid. He always did.
We decided to take a cab back to the hotel. As soon as the key turned in the lock, bodies lurched toward beds, chairs, love seats, and cots, everyone looking to secure a spot to sleep off dinner. I found my father tucked in the corner of his room, sitting on a love seat, reading. I lay down on his bed and watched him read. There was something peaceful about the way he connected with a book. He kept this weird little smile on his face, like a toddler was whispering something in his ear.
He leaned over and picked up an empty can of Planters peanuts that was sitting on top of a Where Chicago magazine. “What’s this?”
“Uh, a can of peanuts.”
He turned it upside down and let the peanut dust fall onto the coffee table and the carpeting. “It’s empty.”
“Looks like it.”
“Where’d these come from?” Twitch.
“The minibar, I guess.”
Then, in a long, guttural, slow-motion moan, he said, “Who said you kids could open the minibar?” For a second I thought he was having a stroke, or maybe I was having a stroke.
“Dad?”
His ears, siphoning the wine from the veins in his cheeks, went bloodred.
“What’s the matter, Dad?”
“Do you have any idea how expensive these are?”
Because of the way his jaw was clenched, I knew this wasn’t really a question. I inched my way backward across the bedspread, just in case I needed to scramble for the door.
“Do you?”
“Um . . .”
“Seven dollars!” Major spine-twisting twitch. “They’re SEVEN DOLLARS A CAN!”
“Dad, I—”
“Who opened these?”
“I don’t know, Dad. Not me,” I said, which really was the truth, but I knew I had created a damaging ripple effect. “Not me” only planted the seeds of frustration in my father, which grew exponentially with each and every subsequent “not me.” The first guy to say it was typically in the clear, but it landed everyone else in deep shit. Sometimes, though, you just have to save yourself.
As he marched, empty peanut can wrapped in his paw, into the other room to interrogate the others, I did a little math.
The hotel room.
“WHO ATE THESE?”
Plus the dinner.
“Who?”
Plus the drinks.
“These aren’t free, you know.”
Plus the walkin’-around money.
“That minibar is off-limits. Understand. Do you understand?”
I heard a quiet round of yesses and knew everyone was trying not to laugh. It sounds terrible, I know, but his breaking-point tantrums invariably had a morsel that made keeping a straight face next to impossible. George didn’t prepare for hysteria. When his veins started popping, it didn’t matter if his hair was standing on end, if his face was half covered with shaving cream, or if he was in his underwear. He just let it r
ip, and what you saw was what you got. That night, because of the enormous dinner, he had taken his belt off and unbuttoned his pants.
The next morning he walked down Michigan Avenue to a Walgreens, bought a can of Walgreens-brand peanuts, brought them back, and placed them in the minibar just so. It never occurred to him that the person who restocked the thing might notice the slight difference in brands and charge him anyway. Again, how do you keep a straight face? You tell me. Of course, no one ever confessed to the peanut mistake. Unbuttoned pants or not, eating a seven-dollar can of peanuts was a serious offense. Simply put, they were not ours to eat. We had no business opening that minibar. Whoever ate those peanuts has managed to keep their mouth shut to this day. Had it been me, I’m not sure I would have confessed. I’m not sure I would even now.
George’s eightieth birthday at Jack Pandl’s. From left to right: Peggy, Chrissy, Johnny, Amy, George, Julie, Katie, Stevie, Jeremiah, and Jimmy.
PART II
What are we to make of Christ?
There is no question of what we can make of Him,
it is entirely a question of what
He intends to make of us.
You must accept or reject the story.
—C. S. Lewis
10
From There to Here
As I reached for a set of sheets on the top shelf of my linen closet, the hair on my arm brushed against the soft plastic end of a warped flyswatter. It hung on a crooked nail. I supposed I had put it there, though I had no recollection of doing so. I pulled it from its hook, rolled the bent wire handle around my fingers, and heard a voice in my memory saying, Can we leave that for the new people?
It was George. The two of us were standing on a musty-smelling bed of flattened rhubarb behind the garage in Oostburg, staring at an upside-down rusty bathtub. A jigsaw puzzle of yellow paint had chipped away from the tub’s underbelly, and black moss sprouted around the claw feet on one end. My mother loved that tub. The thing had made the move from Milwaukee to Cedar Grove and then to Oostburg. It was a little piece of Prospect Avenue, a classic leftover from a remodeling job of the boys’ bathroom. Each time the movers hauled it from the back of their van, before telling them to put it behind the garage, she talked of restoring it to its original beauty and putting it to use. I was pretty sure the new people wouldn’t need it, but certain also that lifting it would reveal something with beady eyes and razor-sharp teeth. I said, “Yeah, I’m thinking we can.”